Comparison Shopping On The Net
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, U.S.A., 1998 JUN 3 (Newsbytes) -- By Bob Woods,
Newsbytes. At first, real-world retailers brought the experience of
shopping at malls or stores onto the Internet. Now, comparison shopping
is next for cyberspace, via the new WebMarket service from go2net Inc.
[NASDAQ:GNET].
Web shoppers can get pricing on a variety of products and services
from many Web sites with WebMarket, officials said, and they can
compare prices from several Web merchants from one source.
WebMarket's search capabilities cut across a fairly wide swath of
merchant categories on the Web: apparel, books/stationery, computer
hardware/software, consumer electronics, department stores, games/toys,
general merchandise, music, movie/video and outdoor gear.
Within each category, the stores represented seemed to be fairly
complete. In books/stationery, many smaller stores were represented, as
well as the "big 3" in bookselling: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and
Borders.
Results from WebMarket can be searched by price, merchant, brand,
availability, shipping parameters and other criteria. Each result has a
link to the corresponding merchant Web site, so the user can
immediately purchase the desired item at the best price. The actual
purchases are made at merchants' Web sites.
Go2net quoted a Jupiter/NFO Interactive survey of online consumers
that waid while 77 percent of buyers are going online with a specific
purchase in mind, 79 percent of those shoppers visit several sites
before making a purchase. Jupiter believes that automated bots for
comparison shopping will be the key to attracting the majority of
today's online shoppers, go2net said.
WebMarket will launch with a two month, $100,000 online ad campaign
that will run on major search engines and directories as well as on
other go2net sites, including MetaCrawler.
WebMarket also BizRate reports and ratings on merchants at the
WebMarket site. BizRate independently evaluates Web merchants.
Go2net is joining with Junglee Corp. in its new venture. Junglee
develops comparison shopping comparison technology and personnel
recruitment systems for the World Wide Web.
Go2net officials were not immediately available for comment.
WebMarket is at webmarket.com , while go2net's main Web
site is at go2net.com . Other go2net sites include
MetaCrawler at metacrawler.com , PlaySite at
playsite.com , and StockSite at stocksite.com .
Go2net is also acquiring Silicon Investor, at techstocks.com
, a Web-based financial discussion site.
Reported By Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com .
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(19980603/Press Contacts: Jennifer McLean, Insync Communications, 503-
412-3642; Kirby Winfield, go2net, Inc., 206-447-1595 /WIRES ONLINE,
BUSINESS/)
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